1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to processing systems and processors, and more specifically to techniques for sharing a set of controls to enable an application to control multiple facilities of a processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
Many processors have facilities, such as a performance monitoring facility, built into the hardware for tracking various performance characteristics such as instructions executed, cache misses, processor stalls, and other performance related events. The facilities may be highly secure and may be accessible by an operating system under a privileged execution level. The operating system utilizes this access to assist in determining the performance of the processor under certain conditions. The operating system may provide such performance information to certain software applications upon demand such as by system calls or other signals. However, due to the secure nature of the information, the operating system will only provide such performance information to an application so long as the security of that information is maintained. For example, an operating system should not provide performance information of a processor when it is being utilized by one application to a different application.